Reading a perspicacious essay on the craft of writing can be a little like stepping on the scale at the doctor’s office: you know that what you’re about to learn is important and could empower you to change for the better, but part of you wants to keep the state of ignorance with which your habits fit so comfortably.
For me this was especially true with William Wenthe’s essay “The Craft of Thought: The Sentence in Contemporary Poetry.” It’s in the Spring issue of the Kenyon Review, which should be hitting your news stands and mailboxes any day now. As Wenthe points out, in discussions of craft, the sentence is usually neglected in favor of the line. The sentence seems like a prose unit, meant for organizing rather than for singing.
Yet composing a poem is a process of putting sentences, or parts of sentences, together in a particular and necessary order. Even poems that aim to subvert the sentence “convey their energy largely through their resistance to the principle of syntax” (153). Though we may not be accustomed to considering sentence and syntax as part of the poet’s craft, we may know vaguely that these things matter.
What Wenthe’s essay shows is precisely how they matter. At the foundation is this definition of the sentence, borrowed from Wendell Berry:
The sentence is a pattern of felt sense. The sentence is a way of thinking, it is the form, the shape of thought; but it is also, Berry insists, a way of feeling. And it is this concurrence of feeling with thought that literature, poetry in particular, desires. (155)
After laying the rhetorical and logical groundwork, Wenthe goes on to diagnose poems in light of this notion, showing how the poem’s effectiveness or lack thereof results from the way it uses or misuses the sentence.
Particularly devastating is the section that opens thus: “Much free verse of the last few decades inhabits a sentence pattern that I have come to call ‘the standard poetic sentence,’ which consists of a simple declarative sentence, followed by one or more modifying clauses, these often based on a present participle–the ‘ing’ form of a verb” (166). Although Wenthe cites a Roethke poem in which this structure works well, he also cripples bits of Shakespeare, Whitman, and Dickinson by recasting them in “standard poetic sentence” form.
I went scurrying to my manuscript to see if I’m guilty, because Wenthe is right. This syntax is everywhere, and I know that I have felt myself reaching for it like a bag of potato chips at times when the real poem is not forthcoming. Wenthe: “This syntactical model will be used as mere scene-painting, a way of getting a lot of ‘stuff’ out there, while dressing it in the vaguely incantatory, quasi-anaphoric feel of the repeated participial verb form” (167). It’s not just tired; when used ineffectively, it’s a crutch.
When I was in graduate school, I was fortunate to attend a seminar with visiting writer Ellen Bryant Voight, who applied her thinking on sentences and syntax to our poems. Afterward, I remember the Kenyon Review’s own Tyler Meier saying, in effect, “I’m not sure you can be aware of how syntax is working in your poem during composition. But you can be aware of it during revision.”
To me, as a writer, that’s still the key question that arises from Wenthe’s essay. When you’re writing, can you know how sentences, and the accretion of those sentences into a poem, are creating the poem? You may not know it, but I think you can smell it. After reading Wenthe’s essay, I’m convinced that syntax is a big part of what’s wrong when the poem feels flat, shapeless, and inert; it’s also what you feel when writing is going well, when you feel that the poem is showing itself to you, line by line.
And in revision, certainly you can attend to syntax. But first you have to read the essay.